not a hostile condition
by irnan
Summary: Leia sees light, flowing out from one person and melting into the brightness of the next. Mara sees cause and effect, like a game of dominoes. Jaina and Anakin see engines, pulsing, intricate. Jacen sees hearts, fragile, strong. And Luke sees threads.


_this is a disclaimer._

**not a hostile condition**

Decades later Luke will still remember this moment perfectly, a snapshot out of time, barely a heartbeat before it was over but all he has to do is shut his eyes and see:

Dim narrow corridors voices alarms going off shouting – somewhere to his right there's Han and Chewie, somewhere behind them Leia, somewhere else Wedge and the Rogues are running for their fighters, but here and now there is only:

The crossroads, intersection of two bare corridors, indistinguishable except that there's more smoke in one than the other, emptiness behind him, to his left. In front: an assassin droid, stormtroopers, the grenade in his hand, smooth, heavy for such a small thing, lethal.

Luke was holding it in his right hand, but even after Bespin he remembers the sensation, the weight, the texture of the casing.

He looks up, calculating, a hundred yards? Question is, will it hit the droid? The damn thing's programmed to come after Leia, nothing but annihilation will stop it. Luke weighs the grenade in his hand; it's taking seconds, heartbeats, less, but it feels like forever, and as he whips his arm back and leans and puts his whole body into the throw he sees it:

Light curving from his arm to the droid connecting them spiralling outwards connecting everything everyone everywhere not light at all but glowing threads gentle as cobwebs harder than steel and Luke knows, suddenly, with a surety which is not his but older deeper from a place inside him he'd long not believed existed and has no hope of understanding, that he has the power to reach out and touch one of those gossamer unbreakable threads and do –

Whatever he wants with it.

Touch shift move dis/re/connect tap that thread the ceiling will fall blow on this one the lights will go out anything anywhere he's standing at the heart of a spider's web which is not a spider's web but the universe itself and it's terrifying and glorious and triumphant and it feels like _coming home_.

Luke Skywalker throws the grenade.

It hits the assassin droid intended for the girl he does not yet consciously understand is his sister.

He turns, shout of triumph on his lips, and runs, and holds the memory of that endless heartbeat in his mind like a talisman. _This is what I'll be._

(Luke never knows it, but he brushes a thread that day, ethereal steel shivering with the echo of his presence, carrying it far out into the galaxy to the waiting hand of a man who used to be a boy who saw the world in the exact same way – only not as Luke glimpsed it, in briefest instants that came and went and never stayed for long, but _all the time_.)

"But you killed," his love says. "The first time you saw the world like that – sank into the Force like that – you used it to kill."

Luke twines his fingers with hers slow thoughtful. "I saved my sister's life," he says.

His love snorts indelicately tosses her flame-red hair. "From a certain point of view," she mocks.

He kisses her fingers long strong capable a thief's hands and a killer's and there are lights, there, binding them together, threads stronger than steel and less tangible than sunlight, twining through their joined fingers, rushing outwards in a great sweep to touch their son and their daughters and spill out into the great Temple around them winding about the feet of their family and friends and students and teachers to sink down into the jungle and spiral up to the very stars themselves.

They sit at the heart of a spider's web, immutable and ever-changing.

"All I knew," he says, "in that moment, was... it had to be done."

"Kind of how I felt about marrying you," his love says, and her grin is brighter than all the lights of the universe that Luke has ever seen.

(It's been a long time coming, but he knows now what he must have looked like to the man who used to be the boy who saw the threads of light in everything, all the time.)


End file.
